Carolina Caycedo: ‘There are struggles that are connected worldwide. Hopefully my work becomes a bridge between these struggles’

At the opening of Artes Mundi 10, Caycedo talks about her work exposing environmental abuses, racial injustice and celebrating acts of feminist and indigenous resistance

Carolina Caycedo was born in the UK in 1978 to Colombian parents and now lives and works in Los Angeles. She has spent the last two decades researching and documenting environmental abuses, through public engagement projects, ranging far and wide in her research and interventions, including in Bogotá, Toronto, Madrid and São Paulo.

She had her first solo UK show at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2022-2023), and appeared in the group show Back to Earth at the Serpentine Gallery in 2023. In Gateshead and London, she showed elements of her constellation of works Be Dammed (2012-ongoing), about the devastating consequences on environments and communities of huge infrastructural dam-building projects.

Carolina Caycedo, installation view, Artes Mundi 10, Chapter, Cardiff. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

For Artes Mundi, Caycedo presents a new work from this series in a lightbox above the entrance of Chapter, Cardiff, as well as a major installation of works at Oriel Davies in Newtown. These include a new video piece, Fuel to Fire (2023), which draws viewers into a Colombian ritual intended to restore the balance of life cycles and equilibrium between species.

Carolina Caycedo, My Female Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018 to present), installation view, Artes Mundi 10, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown.

Also on show are: Fuel to Fire: Mineral Intensive (2022-ongoing), a series of huge pencil drawings depicting extractive practices and their impact on the land, and My Female Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018 to present), a textile that offers more than 100 portraits of female environmentalists, including indigenous activists and the UK women who camped outside a US nuclear missile base at Greenham Common through the 1980s. These are displayed alongside protest banners from local women, calling themselves Women for Life on Earth, which were also carried to Greenham Common.

Carolina Caycedo, installation view, Artes Mundi 10, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Her photographs and printed works are often reproduced on a huge scale and installed dynamically, from the ceiling and across the floor, to disrupt the classical European landscape tradition of tidy, framed display.

Caycedo’s work is in many collections, including the Guggenheim, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, and the Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland.

Carolina Caycedo: Artes Mundi 10
Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown
and Chapter, Cardiffhapter, Cardiff
20 October 2023 – 25 February 2024

Interviews by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Carolina Caycedo, installation view, Artes Mundi 10, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown. Photo: Martin Kennedy.